How much should an indie artist spend on promotion?

There’s no standard figure, so start from the platforms’ own minimums and spend only what you could lose on a test without stress. Any “right” percentage you see online is someone’s opinion.

The floors are lower than people expect. Meta’s pricing page suggests starting with at least $5 and running for more than six days. Spotify’s Marquee and Showcase campaigns take a budget of $100 to $10,000, charged per click, and saves count as clicks.

Money alone won’t open Spotify’s tools, though. Showcase needs 1,000 streams in the last 28 days in a market, and Marquee needs 5,000 monthly active listeners there, as our promotion plan lays out. Below those numbers, social ads are your only paid option.

Discovery Mode costs nothing upfront. Spotify takes a 30% commission on recording royalties from streams in Discovery Mode contexts, and it’s built for teams with about 25,000 monthly listeners.

To set your own number, pick one song, one platform and a test budget you won’t miss. Decide before you spend what counts as a win: saves, followers and listeners who come back a month later. Raw streams don’t count. If real people return, spend more. If they don’t, change the ad or the song first.

Skip anything priced per stream or per playlist add. Spotify treats those as fake streams.